Ideas for Educators

Easy Review Strategy

07/25/2014

This week I was working with a creative group of teachers from American Leadership Academy in Arizona.The teaching ideas were being generated so quickly that the temperature rose to 116 degrees! I challenged the group to develop variations on the traditional "ticket out the door" idea. Here's one of the ideas a teacher shared.

Give the students a paper that has the outline of your state, repeated twice, like the example below. Better yet, save the prep time and just have students draw it.
Have them label the left as "State" and the right as "Restate."
Direct students to "state" what they learned in the lesson, and then paraphrase or "restate" what they learned.

Memory experts tell us that students need to recode learning into their own words in order to move it into long-term memory. This is such a simple way to do that! I especially love that it can be used by any teacher, any subject area, any grade level!

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Brain Bursts

07/18/2014

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Keep students actively attending during read aloud or lectures with these Brain Bursts!

Combine a brain image with a burst image, print, laminate and adhere to a wooden craft stick.

Explain to students that their brains have bursts of electricity when they make connections and think about new ideas.

Then give each student a Brain Burst and ask them to use their dry erase markers to write the concept of the day on the brain. In this example, students were learning about similes.

They kept the Brain Bursts on their desks, and were encouraged to raise it high whenever they heard a simile. During read aloud time there were several, but the teacher also used them in her conversation throughout the day.

Students were paying attention and excited to have the opportunity to share their brain burst with the class.

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My Augmented Reality Summer

07/01/2014

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One of my summer projects is to develop more lessons that integrate augmented reality (AR.) A few weeks back I described AR in a post about a specific app that utilizes this technology. I was so inspired by the reactions of the students, that I have been playing around with Aurasma, an app that lets you design your own AR experiences for free.

In addition to using it in classrooms, I am going to model it in my adult workshops. My first try is with a workshop handout I occasionally use to review Marzano's top instructional strategies research. I have augmented it with a video clip of Marzano explaining his big mistake. To see my AR overlay, follow these steps:

Download the free Aurasma app onto your mobile device.
Click the search icon.
Enter annebeninghof's Auras and choose to follow.
Once you are following my channel, click the frame icon at the bottom of the screen.
Scan the above photo of the handout about Marzano.
A purple swirl should appear to show that the image is triggering the overlay.
View the brief video.

In the fall I will blog about many of the ideas I create this summer with Aurasma. What will you create?

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Learning Time Line

06/19/2014

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A Learning Time Line is a wonderful way to capture learning over time or throughout a unit of instruction. Because research supports the use of non-linguistic approaches to capture and review concepts, I have used this strategy with students in the past. This week I decided to try it with adults. During a 3 day professional learning workshop on co-teaching, we documented our learning with words and pictures on a scroll of chart paper hung on the wall. I love no-prep strategies like this one!

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Get some Pow! for your Teaching

06/07/2014

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It's Saturday morning and I just spent about 30 minutes learning how to use PowToon - a free animation tool. It was very intuitive, with a sufficient variety of free tools to leave me feeling satisfied. Of course, you can upgrade to a Pro account if you have spare dollars, but it's not necessary. I will use this as a teacher to add some "Pow" to my instruction, and can imagine how much fun students will have using it, too!

Watch my simple video and then find some play time!

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Web Site Word Clouds

05/12/2014

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Did you know that you can develop a word cloud of a website?

Tagxedo.com allows you to enter a URL and automatically generate a word cloud of the text on that site. This is an efficient way for students preview or review a site with a lot of text, or for a class to explore key vocabulary terms they will encounter on the site.

The screenshot to the left is a word cloud Tagxedo created of my website.Try one for your class website and see what pops up!

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Plickers - an easy formative assessment tool

05/08/2014

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Looking for an easy, engaging formative assessment tool? Try Plickers - like a clicker system without the expense!

Here's how it works:

1.Go to the website and print out the cards for your class. Each card has a unique barcode - a paper clicker. Each side of the card has a letter A-D. Link each card to a student name, i.e. 1 = Ashley, 2 = Caleb, 3 = Stephen, etc.

2. Using the app on your smartphone or iPad, design a multiple choice question. Choose the best answer A-D. Ask the students the question verbally, display it under a doc cam or on your projector, or write it on a board.

3. Students answer questions by holding up their plickers so that they face the teacher's device. The teacher scans the cards - see the video below.

4. The teacher gets an instant bar graph while scanning and data that shows how each individual student answered the question. Answers are even color-coded green and red for correct/incorrect. You can show the students or keep the results private.

Plickers can be used for assessing students' knowledge but would also be effective for polling their opinions. If students keep their plickers in their desks or folders for class, they can quickly pull them out for an on-the-spot assessment.

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Making Writing Come Alive with colAR

04/25/2014

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Augmented Reality (AR) is an exciting new tool for engaging students. "Like QR codes on steroids," (Thanks, Mark Blair), AR provides a live, direct view of the real world supplemented by computer generated sensory input. Still in in its infancy, the AR world is exploding with options.

colAR Mix is a free AR app for iOs and Android that causes specific coloring pages to come to life in moving, 3D images. colAR provides several free coloring pages, and then additional pages which can be purchased.

This week, we used colAR to enhance our poetry writing and figurative language lessons. Students were given several picture options (free pages) and directed to write a poem about the picture, using figurative language - of course, instruction occurred! When they finished, the wrote the poem around the edge of the page, colored it in, and used the app to see it come alive.

Motivation levels were very high and students were excited to share with each other. Final work was posted in the hallway so that anyone passing by could see how students' poetry came alive!

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Flipped Lessons with Doceri

04/22/2014

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I have been using a wonderful software program/app called Doceri for several years now. It allows your iPad to mirror whatever is on your computer, and then acts as an interactive whiteboard and screencast recorder.

If I want to show a website or a word document to students, I can open it on my laptop (connected to my projector) activate Doceri on my iPad, and my iPad will show what is on my computer screen. I can then annotate, drawing my students' attention to certain features, or pass my iPad to a student who can annotate for us.

In addition, Doceri has a recording feature that will allow me to develop flipped lessons. I can put together a slide show using Keynote or a similar program, run it on my computer mirrored to my iPad, and then annotate with my finger or stylus while recording the lesson and my voice.

Doceri has a variety of annotation tools, is intuitive to use and has been very reliable.

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Do your students need choices for accessing text?

04/13/2014

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Last week I attended the Council for Exceptional Children's annual conference in Philadelphia. There were hundreds of sessions to choose from and by the end, my mind was bursting with ideas.

One of the sessions I attended was on differentiating for gifted learners, led by Dr. Karen Megay-Nespoli. At one point she suggested that it can be beneficial to have options for how a student might access a text. While she was primarily referring to digital options, it got me thinking about how we might offer a variety of options, for students of all abilities, to access text in their own preferred style.

Students are familiar with tic-tac-toe menus, so I chose this as the medium for presenting them with options. Here is the menu I created - feel free to edit it to fit your own needs!

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<< Previous

Easy Review Strategy

Brain Bursts

My Augmented Reality Summer

Learning Time Line

Get some Pow! for your Teaching

Web Site Word Clouds

Plickers - an easy formative assessment tool

Making Writing Come Alive with colAR

Flipped Lessons with Doceri

Do your students need choices for accessing text?

Anne M. Beninghof

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